Enterprises Need A Private Cloud Solution Now

Enterprises desire a highly reliable cloud infrastructure. Companies like Google and Amazon have been able to build and deploy clouds at a very large scale, and offer them as public clouds; however, there is no existing solution that allows enterprises to have a similar in-house system. Some alternatives, like OpenStack and VMware vCloud Suite, require expert admins to ensure availability of the private cloud components. Unfortunately, these existing models are too limiting. As enterprises embrace web-scale IT, they require an automated self-healing private cloud with minimal manual monitoring and remediation.

The Difficulty With Using Traditional Private Clouds

A traditional OpenStack-based private cloud is comprised of several services that provide compute, storage, and network virtualization. The current state of providing high-availability services relies on external components which are bolted-on (e.g., utilizing a load-balancer to front multiple instances of a stateless service). In the event of a component failure, the load-balancer routes requests to the still running instance. This solution is not self-healing and requires manual intervention to recover completely (e.g., restarting the failed component). Stateful services, like database and messaging, require additional software and configuration to achieve high availability. This extra configuration leads to heterogeneous nodes in the cluster, making cluster management more challenging.

ZeroStack’s Solution

In contrast, ZeroStack has designed a symmetric self-healing OpenStack-based private cloud solution.

A Service Monitor is responsible for keeping the various services healthy and running. It does this by doing health checks on the OpenStack services and repairing them on failures. The architecture is symmetric and any node in a ZeroStack cluster can run the monitor and any of the cloud services. All the nodes in the cluster are part of the management layer, which employs a consensus protocol to select one node in the system to run the Service Monitor. The consensus protocol also ensures that there is only one monitor in a ZeroStack cluster at any time, even in the presence of network partitions, to avoid multiple instances from taking conflicting actions.

If the node on which the monitor is running crashes, the consensus protocol elects a new node to run it. This ensures that there is always a monitor instance running in the cluster. The consensus protocol is also used to store the monitor state, enabling a new instance to start off exactly where the previous instance stopped. The Service Monitor runs multiple health checks on the various services and takes appropriate remedial measures, like restarting services or migrating them from crashed or degraded nodes to healthy ones. The monitor performs detailed service-specific health checks on various services, as it has been purpose-built to monitor these services. This is better than the high-level health checks carried out by a generic load-balancer used in traditional OpenStack HA solutions. This allows the Service Monitor to observe and automatically respond to various anomalies in the system, which would otherwise require manual intervention.

The services that are migrated across nodes should remain reachable to the other services and clients in the cluster. We achieve this by creating a virtual network interface for each service with an associated virtual IP, which does not change even if the service migrates across nodes. For stateful services, the data is stored on distributed storage reachable from all the nodes; this ensures that the services can access their data even if they migrate across nodes.

Testing Is Essential

To test our architecture, we regularly run multiple automated tests that introduce various faults — including service crashes, node reboots, node crashes and network disconnects — on a running OpenStack cluster. We also verify that the cluster is able to quickly recover from all of these faults. Our design enables the cluster to automatically recover, thereby requiring minimal manual intervention. Removing the operational overhead allows organizations to spend more time and resources in consuming their private cloud, not running it.

In future blog posts, we will dive deeper into some of the key components of our architecture, and also share the practical knowledge we have gained while running OpenStack based private clouds.